Amanda N'Duka
DEADLINE
Apr 15, 2020
Gravitas Ventures has set a VOD/digital release for Sean McEwen’s debut feature Braking For Whales on April 24. The Narrator Entertainment and Charlie Baby Productions film stars Tammin Sursok (Pretty Little Liars), Tom Felton (Harry Potter franchise), Wendi McLendon-Covey (The Goldbergs), David Koechner (Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgandy), and Austin Swift (Live By Night). Written and directed by McEwen, the plot charts the unexpected journey of a dysfunctional brother and sister who are forced to come to terms with each other and themselves over their recently deceased mother’s final wish. Unique, clever and insightful, this is a story that many can relate to – none can push our buttons like family. McEwen, Sursok and Cassidy Lunnen produced the Boston Film Festival award-winning pic, while Takashi Cheng served as executive producer. Producer Cassidy Lunnen negotiated on behalf of the filmmakers with Brett Rogalsky, on behalf of Gravitas.
Cinema Guild has set a virtual release date for the 2019 Cannes Film Festival Special Jury Prize winner Liberté, written and directed by Albert Serra. The release, which will mark the launch of Cinema Guild’s virtual cinema initiative, is slated for May 1 in partnership with Film at Lincoln Center, with a national rollout to follow on May 8. The pic, which was also an official selection of the Toronto Film Festival and New York Film Festival, takes place just before the French Revolution, in a forest outside Berlin. It follows a band of libertines expelled from the court of Louis XVI who rendezvous with the legendary German seducer and freethinker, the Duc de Walchen (Helmut Berger), to convince him to join in their mission: the rejection of authority and all moral boundaries. What begins as an evening of strategizing on the proliferation of libertinage, descends into a Sadean night of pansexual one-upmanship. Cinema Guild’s upcoming releases include Kazik Radwanski’s Anne at 13,000 Ft, Mehrdad Oskouei’s Sunless Shadows and Hong Sangsoo’s The Woman Who Ran.